My Coffee Habit is Starting to Get Out of Control
This is a picture I took of a cabinet in the kitchen of one of my many apartment homes. It is not a staged photo. How did this come to be, you may be thinking. Let me try to explain.
I was living in Harlem at the time and found myself out of a job. This sudden vacancy in employment happened because my boss sold the lease on his restaurant where I bartended. We know that he made out quite nicely on that transaction. I can say there were signs of the end coming, but it came quicker than most of us imagined. We were given this great news just two days before Christmas that year, the day after our holiday party. We took this photo of the last supper as a joke that night.
It was by far the most ideal job I have ever had. I hated losing it. Hated it. I was bitter about it for too long, but I did get five great years of life experience. I learned so much from the people of the Upper West Side and the many others that found their way to a bar stool on the corner of 75th Street and Amsterdam looking to get my attention from across the bar.
Attaining this knowledge from them was easy, too easy really. First, all I had to do was pour them the alcoholic beverage they had freely requested. Then after they were finished with their second drink I started asking questions. Surprisingly, a lot of the questions I asked would get an answer of some kind. Drunk and buzzed people like to talk so I would ask interesting questions, test the boundaries. I spoke with lawyers, doctors, realtors, musicians, pizza makers, writers, dreamers, and all the other kinds of people. So much information.
This was also the perfect kind of job for an introvert like myself because the interaction is a forced one. I can shine brightly when faced with forced interactions even though on the inside I am tangled in knots and my feet, hands, and forehead are sweating. Do they see that sweat on my forehead? Of course they do. I get over it because I am being social, we are social creatures. Oddly, we need people. I take my fill but know if I am not a worker behind that bar there is no way I would be talking to these people. I liked that.
At this job, I would also become a part of another great restaurant family, One of many I had. These were the people I worked in the trenches with every day. I loved these people, yet like with past restaurant families, I left them in the dust once I was gone because of my terrible ability to be a real person. I think I have an evil force orbiting around my being that leads me to stray from people who care. These are friendships that should have been lifelong and there have been a lot of them. Maybe it was good to have those multiple experiences with many different people I tell myself to feel better. But then I question if it was worth the cost of not being in these peoples' lives in the present, right now, not knowing what is going on with them. That is one to think about when the lights go down and my head hits the pillow.
However, you may be wondering about the abundance of coffee in my cabinet and not how I struggle with my personality or bartending job. Maybe you are interested, I do not know. I think they go hand and hand, the coffee in the cabinet, the personality struggles, and the bartending job.
I am sure there are many other reasons in my life that led to me creating this coffee locker which contained old and new cans of coffee. The first and what I think should be the most obvious is bugs. It is New York City and at this particular apartment, I could not keep my food in dark enclosed areas that were not the refrigerator because of roaches. If I put any kind of food in this cabinet I would see roaches crawling around in there and the sink that is just under this cabinet. When I took the food out the roaches disappeared from the cabinet and the sink too. I do not know where they went and cared not. Easy solution.
Here is another piece of the puzzle. I was also having a hard time leaving home at the time. I did not want to step outside my front door. This may seem odd to some people, and there are few of you who will understand, but it is real. I did not even want to think about turning the handle because I knew what that meant. So, the less trash I made the fewer trips I would seemingly make to the trash bin outside.
This particular situation was aggravated by apartment management. I was furious when they decided to get rid of the trash chute that was two steps out of my apartment. Two steps. Taking the trash out used to take a total of about five or seven miserable seconds outside my comfort zone. I could just barely handle that. Now I had to walk down four flights of stairs and actually step outside into the real world. What if I saw someone? Horrifying.
Obviously, I know a completely sane person does not let this kind of accumulation happen. I do not admit to being completely sane. I hoarded coffee cans for awhile. So what. The odd thing is I still had to take the trash out every day. It would be silly to create such an offering as aged trash to the creatures of the darkness. This was an apartment in a big city with a lot of pests that like to invade anything they can.
I still had most of my wits.
Why the coffee cans though? Why Dan?
Why the coffee cans?
I would be happy to hear your diagnosis.
Peace and Love.